Melancholia in contemporary Spain: digging up a past that did not pass away

Abstract

During its transition to democracy (1975–1983), Spanish society did not confront the memory of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and participated in what is called “a pact of oblivion.” However, at the beginning of this century, it might be observed that the memories of the victims buried in unidentified common graves return in multiple cultural and political practices, evoking a particular type of melancholia about the past. This chapter delves into how a positive type of melancholia shapes the cultural and political processes of recovering the collective memory in twenty-first-century Spain. Its purpose is to substantiate the thesis that, within the current post-war context in Spain, investing melancholia with a political potential has triggered the disruption of homogeneous temporality and brought upon anachronistic temporality. The latter frames the victims of the Spanish Civil War as living civilians and is a necessary step in recovering the rights and dignities that were denied them by the Francoist authorities.